The Technocrat’s Burden

There’s been a lot of talk about democracy hereabouts during the past month or so. And I think that’s a really cool, good thing. It’s the kind of non-topical conversation that can be hard to find in the blogosphere that the League is often fond of delving into, to its credit. We in America (and this is true for the West more generally) live in a nominal republic that takes enormous, perhaps nearly spiritual, pride in the democratic ethos that permeates throughout both political and cultural spheres. But, somewhat paradoxically, that self-assurance can at times bleed into complacency or even thoughtlessness. We don’t always necessarily know what democracy is beyond knowing it’s us; and I don’t think I’d be shocking anyone reading this to claim that, often, we hardly even know ourselves.

It’s always important to have an intimate knowledge of what democracy means, what it doesn’t mean, what it provides, what it takes away, and its more general virtues and flaws alike. The writings that make up the intellectual foundations of Western democracy are littered with exhortations that a democratic or republican people must be educated, virtuous, self-aware, engaged. These are platitudes and even clichés, yes, but they’re also true; could anyone familiar with American politics during the last decade believe otherwise? As important as this kind of introspection is for undoing the mistakes of the past and avoiding the pitfalls of the present, though, I think it’s even more important as we look to the future during this strange, precarious, and transitional moment in time.

Without boring you by going Full Mustache, technology has radically changed the boundaries that separate one system, country, society, or people from another. (In fact, “changed” is probably not the right word. Obliterated? No, not quite — look to the Middle East for proof why. How about “severely diminished”?) With these traditional boundaries so severely diminished come myriad possibilities, many inspiring optimism, even utopianism. But one of the equally important consequences of globalization has been the increased ease with which geopolitics can be understood by looking at it through a lens of transnational class.

You don’t have to buy all the New World Order, Illuminati, Alex Jones bullshit to see this at play. Anyone who follows the Eurozone, or global finance in general, can’t deny that there is indeed a class of people who are no longer constrained by legal or cultural borders.(And, in truth, it’s not necessarily so new, either: recall that Europe, before the French Revolution, was largely run by a transnational nobility.) It’s logical, inevitable, and indeed carries with it enormous potential benefits.

For the human rights community, the increasing universality of politics has been utterly essential for attempts toward systematizing and canonizing baseline standards of behavior. The unsolved climate crisis, too, is another problem that simply cannot be solved with local or even regional solutions alone. As much work as there’s left to do, the world is less unequal, less miserable, less poor, less sick, and less uneducated than it was merely decades ago. For countless people in developed and developing countries both, the enormous reach of commerce has improved their lives, increased their opportunity, and broadened their intellectual understanding.

So I’m not trying to describe a pernicious, looming evil when I write that this kind of globalization, beside doing these many good things, also stands as a genuine and confounding threat to democracy. Not inherently, not unalterably — but still. We’ve touched on the negative repercussions of this threat when we’ve talked about the riots in Greece and elsewhere. But it’s important for us to remember that, as ugly, stupid, counter-productive, and regrettable as these acts of chaos and violence have been, they’re not solely the consequence of people throwing a tantrum of having their luxurious social services paired-down or taken away. It’s very much the case that not only what these changes are, but how they’ve come about has led to such enormous, unrestrained outrage.

And while the destruction it often inspires is irrational, I don’t think the fear is as well. A profound elitism and chauvinism has permeated so much of how political, economic, and media elites have managed the EU crisis. The constant appeals for a cabal of wise, “technocratic” problem-solvers to swoop in and clean up the mess would always strike me and many others as distasteful; but it would certainly be less insulting if not for the fact that, by and large, and for reasons good and bad, the EU is the product of elites. Tsk-tsking the citizens of various European states — be they Germans who don’t want to foot a bill they were promised they’d never have to pay; or Italians, Greeks, or Spaniards who were told that increased competition and lowered wages for their labor would be compensated with easy credit and the many amenities it brings — is buck-passing in the extreme.

But rather than inspire a greater appreciation on the part of many elites for democracy (needed if for no other reason than the necessity of creating a sense of public ownership of policies when they go bad) it seems to me like more than a few Masters of the Universe have responded to the events of this year, and indeed all of the years of the financial crisis, by imagining that whatever they were doing before, they’d have to simply do more of it, but better. Most of the time I feel like this is the subtext of various ostensible mea culpas or explanations for what’s gone wrong; but in a thread yesterday, bluntobject highlighted a Karl Smith post that was breathtakingly upfront in making this argument:

As I recently told a correspondent: if we are doing our jobs right then people shouldn’t even know that technocrats exist. They should never think about us. They should think about the things they care about; their children, their friends, their love interests, their dreams. If they know about the technocracy then the technocracy has failed.

There is no doubt that these movements – OWS and the Tea Party – are a glaring sign of technocratic failure. We shouldn’t forget that as long as these movements exist. Any moment that a citizen spends thinking about taxes, the economy, lobbyists, the capitalist system, etc is a moment of their lives that we have wasted and that they will never get back.

Time is all that they have, to burn it is to burn their lives away. It is to destroy the very thing we are supposed to protect. If you keep in mind that your ultimate goal is to induce a rational blissful ignorance in your citizens then you I think your ship will always be straight.

I think this is an amazing comment in a few ways, and though I find it disturbing — even horrifying — in nearly as many, I’m also sort of inclined to commend Smith for his honesty. But while it’s clear that Smith undergirds this worldview with good intentions, the above still reads like something from an especially feverish Glenn Beck “exposé”; all of the hoary clichés of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the various half-remembered sins of the Progressive Era’s social engineers immediately rush to the front of my mind. What strikes me most, though, is Smith’s sense that engagement in the political system, that the running of our lives is, for the most of us, time “wasted.”

The implication is that Smith and his ilk — the self-styled technocrats — are little short of martyrs. Citizens are people, after all; and technocrats are people, too. If to care about the economy, taxes, capitalism, and all the sundry aspects of democratic self-governance is to waste our lives, whose lives are more wasted than the technocrats’? To Smith, it must be all the more tragic for the fact that they’re not even doing an especially good job of it! Designated as Protectors of Time, Stewards of Rational Blissful Ignorance (definition: unknown), the technocrats find themselves shipwrecked and surrounded by a crew on the verge of mutiny.

It says something that a very intelligent, generally inoffensive, and somewhat influential intellectual like Smith not only holds these beliefs in 2011, but is so comfortable expressing them in a public forum and draping them in the rhetorical garments of altruism and self-sacrifice. What it says might in some cases vary, depending on the listener; but it’s clear to me that, among other things, it proves that there’s good reason for us to talk about democracy. Those who can’t do teach — and those who can’t teach (and some who can) blog.

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Elias Isquith is a freelance journalist and blogger. He considers Bob Dylan and Walter Sobchak to be the two great Jewish thinkers of our time; he thinks Kafka was half-right when he said there was hope, "but not for us"; and he can be reached through the twitter via @eliasisquith or via email. The opinions he expresses on the blog and throughout the interwebs are exclusively his own.

19 Responses

I think one of the interesting aspects of the technocrats’ attitudes that often goes overlooked is generational. I like to read http://www.generationaldynamics.com for insight on this. (The site is a little over the top, but he does a great daily post on foreign news items). The author argues that it is no coincidence that much of our financial and economic problems started at the same time that those of the greatest generation retired and left the top management positions of industry and government to be replaced by boomers (whose middle management positions, in turn, became dominated by gen Xers). Having never lived through a real depression or global war and having gone through decades of relatively incredible economic growth, the boomers convinced themselves (and us) that ‘this time is different’, that they knew how to handle the business cycle, etc.

I don’t buy that generational differences explain everything (as the site author seems to) but I think it is an interesting piece of the societal puzzle when looking at this.Report

is it the mere fact that the sentiment is anti-democratic that horrifies you?

The implication is that Smith and his ilk — the self-styled technocrats — are little short of martyrs. Citizens are people, after all; and technocrats are people, too. If to care about the economy, taxes, capitalism, and all the sundry aspects of democratic self-governance is to waste our lives, whose lives are more wasted than the technocrats’?

I didnt interpret his statement that way. Rather, what I think he is getting at is that people only think of economic issues when there are widespread economic problems. If there were no economic problems, then people would not be thinking about the economy all the time. Even though we think we have gained from thinking about economic problems today, that we wouldnt think about it if we didnt have problems indicates that there are better things to think about and do. The mea culpa then is just this. As a technocrat, my failure to do my job has caused you to spend time in less than optimal ways. (Also since most lay persons do not get economics, their thinking about it is all wrong and a waste of time anyway. But that’s just me not Smith)Report

I think the question is, though, about whether we want invisible government. Do we want a society where the government has done such a good job constraining our behaviors to the point that crime is quite literally unthinkable?Report

Yeah, but who gets to decide what counts as a problem? For example, income inequality might or might not be–and whether or not it is is a political issue that should be subject to democratic deliberation, not settled by unelected men in gray flannel suits.Report

I’m not seeing the link between the democratic delegation of policy formulation to subject matter experts (“technocrats” in Smith’s parlance) and the rise of the transnational elite. These seem to me to be different, and generally unjuxtaposed, groups of people.

I do see that both have a significant effect on how democracies function. The rise of technocracy is a century-old phenomenon tracing back to figures like Chancellor Bismarck and President Wilson. It takes day-to-day decision-making out of the hands of the democratic process. There is in theory a democratic override and balancing of competing policies effected by representatives accountable to the electorate, but at the end of the day it’s government by regulation rather than government by legislation.

The rise of a globalistic class represents a migration of economic elites away from nationalism. Really, how could a class of transationals arise amongst any stratum of society but economic elites? But while these people may not feel any loyalty to any particular nation, they retain citizenship within at least one nation, and therefore will exercise political power there both as voters and as economic elites. This will steer the democratic portion of the policy-making process towards advancing the interests of the transnational elites, meanng that the (economic) world will flatten.

But these are confluences of events, events which have been a long time coming and which are not done playing out. Not all economic elites are transnational in their loyalties even if they explore money-making opportunities beyond their own countries’ borders. Nation-states aren’t going to go away and neither is democracy. Democracy remains a bedrock principle of governmental legitimacy, even in a heavily technocratic regime and even when the elites of a particular society are visibly cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic.Report

I don’t think there’s much distance, on the whole, between the highly educated and the highly affluent — certainly not in politics. To that point, the only stratum I could see becoming transnational the way the superrich are is the intellectual class — and, again, I think you see this playing out as technology flattens the academic world just the same as it does the economic.

As to the idea that things are as they are and as they’ve been and as they always will be: I guess. The question to me isn’t whether or not “democracy” will go away; I don’t think we need to get into such sweeping and definitive rhetorical territory. The question worth asking though is whether the democracy of the near-future will be commensurate with what we imagine democracy to be. I doubt Smith fashions himself an anti-democrat.Report

But it does not follow that one is going to be of the highly affluent, as you define the term. (Affluent, yes, for the most part).

Moreover, these people in fact *are* the technocratic rank and file that run things in a society – and always have. (Back in the day they were they were the various scribes and astrologers that could tell when the Nile would flood)

And when they fish up, (which they always will eventually, because they are humans in human institutions) and it causes a populist revolt against the existing order – that’s when civilizations collapse. And that is what Smith is concerned about.

Sometimes it’s the witches, sometimes it’s the Jews, in the future its may be technocrats. Scapegoating, *that’s* Smith’s worry, because it always happens eventually.Report

I don’t think there’s much distance, on the whole, between the highly educated and the highly affluent — certainly not in politics.

The affluent tend to be better-educated than the financially distressed, it is true; and in politics, power does seem to coincide with affluence. I suspect that a correlation-causation confusion is very easy to make given only those facts. Education does not necessarily lead to affluence or power — part of the frustration that seems to fuel #OWS.

Speaking for myself, I’m well-educated, as I hold a graduate degree. But while I’m financially comfortable, I’m hardly part of “the 1%.” If I am, no one’s been inviting me to the meetings. I suspect that’s true for a lot of people here, both the credentialed and the autodidacts.Report

Speaking for myself, I’m well-educated, as I hold a graduate degree. But while I’m financially comfortable, I’m hardly part of “the 1%.” If I am, no one’s been inviting me to the meetings. I suspect that’s true for a lot of people here

I can’t tell if you honestly think a plutocratic elite actually runs everything, rather than being one faction of the myriad of social, poltiical and economic forces that makes the world go round.Report

It started in earnest in the 20s with Benjamin Strong, Montagu Norman, Emile Moreau and Hjaldar Schacht — the central bankers from the US, Britain, France and Germany — who controlled behind the scenes. A great book to read is Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed. The book shines a bright light on what’s happening today.Report

Technocratic discourse ‘ventriloquates’ scientific discourse [15, 77] to claimrational objectivity and to promote action supposedly based on reason and fact:‘economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular have attempted to imitatescientific analysis through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, but, above all,through their parodies of the worst of the scientific dialects…

The language of technocracy is a closed discourse that treats opposition asincorrect propaganda [16, 80]. Because “incorrect” oppositional discourses are often cast as naïve “common sense”, they are pervasively denigrated by technocrats, and are tacitly supposed to defer to the more intelligent scientific knowledge generated by the technical elite [15, 71]. In this way, the pseudo-scientific language of technocracy legitimises its claims to power in matters that are uniquely social in nature, simultaneously silencing “common-sense” opposition by their claims to expertise.Report

I perceived Smith on a different angle, nearly appliance based. When you hit the on button on the coffee maker you expect it to work as advertised. There is nearly a appliance cultural phenomena of expecting an unwatched pot to boil.

From August 2018 through February 2019, AVENATTI defrauded a client (“Victim-1”) by diverting money owed to Victim-1 to AVENATTI’s control and use. After assisting Victim-1 in securing a book contract, AVENATTI allegedly stole a significant portion of Victim-1’s advance on that contract. He did so by, among other things, sending a fraudulent and unauthorized letter purporting to contain Victim-1’s signature to Victim-1’s literary agent, which instructed the agent to send payments not to Victim-1 but to a bank account controlled by AVENATTI. As alleged, Victim-1 had not signed or authorized the letter, and did not even know of its existence.

Specifically, prior to Victim-1’s literary agent wiring the second of four installment payments due to Victim-1 as part of the book advance, AVENATTI sent a letter to Victim-1’s literary agent purportedly signed by Victim-1 that instructed the literary agent to send all future payments to a client trust account in Victim-1’s name and controlled by AVENATTI. The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which AVENATTI promptly began spending for his own purposes, including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery, online retailers, payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, and insurance. When Victim-1 began inquiring of AVENATTI as to why Victim-1 had not received the second installment, AVENATTI lied to Victim-1, telling Victim-1 that he was still attempting to obtain the payment from Victim-1’s publisher. Approximately one month after diverting the payment, AVENATTI used funds recently received from another source to pay $148,750 to Victim-1, so that Victim-1 would not realize that AVENATTI had previously taken and used Victim-1’s money.

Approximately one week later, pursuant to AVENATTI’s earlier fraudulent instructions, the literary agent sent another payment of $148,750 of Victim-1’s book advance to the client account controlled by AVENATTI. AVENATTI promptly began spending the money for his own purposes, including to make payments to individuals with whom AVENATTI had a personal relationship, to make a monthly lease payment on a luxury automobile, and to pay for airfare, dry cleaning, hotels, restaurants and meals, payroll, and insurance costs. Moreover, to conceal his scheme, and despite repeated requests to AVENATTI, as Victim-1’s lawyer, for assistance in obtaining the book payment that Victim-1 believed was missing, AVENATTI led Victim-1 to believe that Victim-1’s publisher was refusing to make the payment to the literary agent, when, as AVENATTI knew, the publisher had made the payment to the literary agent, who had then sent the money to AVENATTI pursuant to AVENATTI’s fraudulent instructions.

Here are my principal conclusions:1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Rep. Justin Amash, a critic of President Trump who entertained a run against him in 2020, became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

The Michigan lawmaker, often the lone Trump dissenter on his side of the aisle, shared his conclusions in a lengthy Twitter thread after reviewing the full special counsel report.

Amash wrote that after reading the 448-page report, he’d concluded that not only did Robert S. Mueller’s team show Trump attempting to obstruct justice, but that Attorney General William Barr had “deliberately misrepresented” the findings and that few members of Congress had even read it. “Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The president often says the report found “no collusion, no obstruction,” though neither is true. Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, which did interfere in the 2016 election. He did not rule on the obstruction of justice question, saying it was something Congress should determine.

Amash, who was first elected to Congress in 2010, declined on Sunday to rule out a possible 2020 presidential run as a Libertarian candidate.

"Well, I would never rule anything out. That's not on my radar right now," he said of a 2020 bid to Tapper. "But I think that it is important that we have someone in there who is presenting a vision for America that is different from what these two parties are presenting."

Amash told Tapper he believes there is a "wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides" and that "Congress is totally broken."

"I think that we need to return to basic American principles, talk about what we have in common as a people -- because I believe we have a lot in common as Americans -- and try to move forward together, rather than fighting each other all the time," Amash said.

Question remains, is Justin Amash going to join any Democrat effort to curtail the president, or is he using this as prelude to something else -- such as his own run for the White House? Drama.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Rooting for Daenerys Targaryen in ‘Game of Thrones’

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a Game of Thrones fan, and her favorite character is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, who Warren says, “has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire.” We learned this in a column Warren wrote for The Cut published Sunday evening.

In the piece, Warren outlines her reasons for her fandom. Daenerys is fair, she fights for the people, and she wants to end slavery. But in talking about Daenerys, Warren can also, subtly, talk about herself. Like the paragraph below, in which she describes the Dragon Queen—or is she describing herself?

“This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical. Skeptical, because they’ve seen another kind of woman on the Iron Throne: the villain we love to hate, Queen Cersei of Casterly Rock.”

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